People watching at Dragon Con? Grab a Mai Tai at Trader Vic’s

Sip among the Disney princesses and Star Wars stormtroopers
2707
Mai Tai
Mai Tai

Photograph by Caroline C. Kilgore

Atlanta is home to one of just two Trader Vic’s left in the country (there used to be 26), and this location has shaken up more than 45,000 Mai Tais since opening in 1976. The tropical cocktail was created by Victor Jules Bergeron Jr., aka Trader Vic, in 1944 and is still made with aged rum, lime juice, orange curaçao, orgeat, and mint. Order one on the first weekend of September and you can sip among cosplay witches and superheroes; the bar is a major Dragon Con hangout. The costumes are so good, one even fooled Milenko Goranovic, a Trader Vic’s bartender: “It was a person dressed as a totally realistic plant,” he says in a Serbian accent. “I walked in and thought maybe we had gotten a new plant for the bar, but then it moved.”

This article originally appeared in our September 2017 issue.

Advertisement